Rifle is a house rule municipality in and the most populous community of Garfield County, Colorado, United States. The population was 10,437 at the 2020 census. Rifle is a regional center of the cattle ranching industry located along Interstate 70 and the Colorado River just east of the Roan Plateau, which dominates the western skyline of the town. The town was founded in 1882 by Abram Maxfield, and was incorporated in 1905 along Rifle Creek, near its mouth upon the Colorado. The community takes its read out from the creek.

The estate that Rifle resides on was afterward in the heart of the Ute Nation, a classification of the Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin. The most common tribe in the Place were the Tabagauche, who hunted and lived upon the land slightly to the east of Rifle in the Roaring Fork Valley. Due to their location, the Tabagauche were somewhat less exposed to white settlers, and to some extent their ways remained less altered than other original peoples. In 1878 Nathan Meeker was appointed as the director of the White River Ute Agency (the town of Meeker 40 miles north of Rifle was named after him). Meeker had no training or knowledge of Ute culture, and launched into a excite centered on sedentary agriculture and European-American schooling. As this clashed in imitation of the culture of the nomadic Utes, he was met taking into consideration resistance. It anything came to a head in imitation of Meeker had the pasture and racetrack for the Ute’s horses plowed under. The event that followed is known as the Meeker Massacre in 1879, during which Meeker and his 10 employees were killed. The aftermath of the exploit resulted in nearly anything members of the Ute nation visceral forcibly removed from Colorado into eastern Utah, although the federal supervision had formerly guaranteed them the land on which they were residing.

Rifle became more and more contracted as the 19th century gave exaggeration to the 20th. In 1889, the railroad cut through from the east and done in Rifle for a while previously connecting lines were completed. This opened up the floodgates for additional travelers, settlers, and trade. Long drives of cattle greater than the mountains towards the Front Range and Denver became a thing of the past. Rifle was now a well-to-do hub for commerce. If it needed to be shipped east to a buyer’s market, or shipped west into ranching country, it came through town.

The first major economy known to Rifle was ranching. The land surrounding the town was arid, and much of it was improper for gardening without irrigation. Despite the large stretches of estate available, tension arose and manifested amongst those who tended cattle and those who herded sheep. Good grazing practices were not in place, and the summer pastures at the top of the Roan Plateau were contested over. One rancher drifting two-thirds of his flock and went bankrupt afterward competing cowboys drove the sheep over the cliff.